A new year is a good excuse for change, and for Denver roots rockers the Fox Street Allstars, that meant a national management deal and wrapping up a new record as 2012 closed out.

We talked with frontman Jonathan "Skippy" Huvard about what's in store for 2013 -- other than playing Conor's on Thursday.

Looks like you're headed into 2013 in great shape, signing with national booking and management and selling out your New Year's Eve show.

Yeah, totally. You know, the last six months or so of 2012 we were kind of just getting things together. Sometimes bands are just like any business, they have to be ever evolving and constantly changing and recreating themselves. So, really, the last six to eight months, we signed with our manager, Dave, and we're just getting everything ready to go and recording the record. We're planning on 2013 being a really big year in terms of being a reinvented band with a new album.

Your next album, Tough Talk, is due out in March. Tell me a little about it.

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The second album -- what's really great about it is that a lot of the tunes we wrote more or less as a unit, whereas the last record was a lot of my tunes, and the ones that weren't were covers. For the most part, you're gonna see a real collaborative effort on this album, from the songwriting standpoint. It's kind of a cool thing because it's indicative of how the band sounds now and it was a big part of how we're shaping how the band sounds now... We're really excited about the songs. We recorded the whole thing on tape so it's got a really vintage sound compared to how most records are done these days, digitally.

The single "Too Good" sounded more bluesy than funky, to me. Is that true for the whole record?

You're gonna see a lot of rock and a lot of blues on this record. We purposefully haven't released any of the funk songs yet off of the record. We wanted to show a different side of Fox Street, and really, the record has a lot of funk and R&B, but we also veered into the softer side a little bit.

I know the live experience is pretty important to the band. What do you try to do for fans, live?

We're a live band first and foremost. We pride ourselves on our shows, and above all it's the reason that people get off at the Fox Street shows. The bottom line is whether we're playing funk, rock, blues or soul, we're playing roots music. It's music that we write, and when we play covers, it's music that we care about. We're not trying to be like anybody else and I think as long as you can be true to yourself, that's going to translate in the sound...We all met at CU and, in our college band, we played at Conor's all the time, and this is the first time we're coming back to Boulder and not coming to the Fox, because we want to connect with people in the bars and give them that live experience and reintroduce Boulder to Fox Street. There's something to be said for coming into a bar and ripping that motherfucker up.

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